Small business owners and active professionals would like a method to make people near them aware of the services they provide regardless of where they are. This is accomplished in a limited fashion by wearing uniforms, badges and logo-printed shirts and operating logo-printed vehicles. This method of communication reaches a human prospect who would then have to make a note of the encountered service provider's services and contact information. A more effective method would be to electronically broadcast profile information which is then directly saved onto devices of other people nearby. Then that information is made available when the owner of that device is specifically looking for such information. For example, instead of a new neighborhood store sending out pamphlets for human consumption, the invention here allows for a device owned and controlled by them to broadcast profile information which can be consumed by other nearby devices including a passing vehicle's navigation system. Then this information is available when a human user of the navigation system is actually looking for such a business. In another example, this invention enables a service provider's device when entering a Wi-Fi enabled coffee shop automatically broadcasts the service provider's profile information which is then received by devices of other users in that coffee shop and stored for later retrieval. As profile content enters the device without human intervention, it is non-intrusive and is more effective. All participating devices associate encountered profiles with the location they were encountered at and count the number of times the same profile and so the same user was encountered.
The Problem Solved:
There is no automatic electronic method to let people around you know who you are and what services you can provide or your interests, hobbies and contact information. In online social networks that exist today tagging of friend profiles as “social”, “work”, or “family” is a manual process. There is no method to automatically rank profiles of friends by frequency of encounter in real life.